Report: New York near bottom in coordinating early childhood education

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ALBANY — New York does a lot for kids. There are nutrition and child care programs as well as early intervention services for youngsters with learning disabilities. There is assistance for families in need.

In New York City, there is universal Pre-K for 4-year-olds and they are expanding to include 3-year-olds as well. The rest of the state has been steadily adding Pre-K, too.

Despite that, the various services are scattershot and hard to keep track of according to a survey released on Thursday.

In fact, New York scores 40th nationally when it comes to efficiency and the ease with which families can use existing programs, according to a survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington D.C.-based organization that studies a range of social service issues.

“We looked at two things. Efficiencies at the state level and the number of children served,” said Linda Smith, director of the early childhood initiative at the Center.

“Families are bouncing around from one agency to another and that is costing low-income families,” she said.

The navigational needs are particularly difficult for low income families, where they might not have a car, or the time or ability to easily visit the various service providers and sign up their kids.

The center’s survey included a flow chart showing where money, which starts at the federal government and is heavily augmented by the state, goes when it comes to programs aimed at improving the well being and educational prospects of children.

There is the Office of Children and Family Services, the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, the Council on Children and Families, and Department of Health, which oversees nutrition programs and early interventions.

“These funding streams are managed in five different agencies and it’s crazy to think when you have money going to five different agencies that coordination is going on,” Smith said.

And that wasn’t counting programs from the Education Department, which is separate from the executive branch in New York.

The money adds up even though it’s unclear how efficiently it is being spent.

State Pre-K alone costs almost $792 million annually while the price tag for Early Head Start, for children under age 3, is $25.4 million, according to the survey.

Smith said New York should look at ways of putting the programs under one roof, which is an admittedly difficult challenge. “Bureaucracies get entrenched and they don’t want to give up something,” Smith said.

There has been some progress, however.

For instance, a group of advocates and experts earlier in December started work on a Child Care Availability Task Force, which was created by the Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2017.

“One of our charges is to look at aligning child care and Pre-K,” said Dede Hill, director of policy for the Schuyler Center, a nonprofit that seeks to improve health and human services in New York, especially for children and families living in poverty.

Hill said that New York’s size makes coordination among programs a challenge.

“There are a lot of systems that have to integrate to work together that probably accounts for us not doing so well,” she said.